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It’s now been 25 years since the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) went into effect, and its growth since launching has been meteoric.
Step Up For Students, the state’s primary facilitator of the FTC scholarships, is celebrating the program’s 25th anniversary. The program took effect July 1, 2001, after then-House Speaker Tom Feeney and then-Senate President John McKay — the latter a namesake for one of the scholarships — ushered the bill through the Legislature and former Gov. Jeb Bush subsequently signed it.
The program gave corporations credit for redirecting their state tax obligations to help low-income families send their children to private schools of their choice.
In its first year, the FTC funded scholarships for 15,585 students. Step Up For Students had just 41 donors who contributed $45.2 million.
Now, Florida is the national leader in education choice, with more than 540,000 students using one of four K-12 choice scholarships administered by Step Up For Students, the largest nonprofit scholarship funding organization in the nation. Since its inception in 2002, Step Up has administered more than 3 million scholarships.
This year, 164 Step Up donors contributed more than $656 million to the FTC program. Since the program’s inception, 750 donors have contributed $9.2 billion over the last quarter century.
“It has been an honor of a lifetime to work with thousands of dedicated people who helped Florida move to a new definition of public education: low-income parents, educators, civil rights leaders and legislators. They all played critical roles,” said John Kirtley, founder and Chair of Step Up For Students.
“Under this new definition, we empower Florida families to choose, or even create, the educational experience that will maximize their children’s chances for success.”
The program has not only grown in scope — the FTC scholarships are now universally available to Florida families, regardless of income — it has also grown in flexibility.
In 2023, state law changed the way funds were facilitated, shifting from a strictly scholarship model to an education savings account (ESA) system where families have flexibility in spending awarded funds. Families may still use the funds to cover private school tuition, but they also now have the flexibility to use them for educational materials and experiences, such as textbooks, curricula, digital materials, tutoring, therapy and more.
Because of the added flexibility, more than 150,000 students receiving FTC funds are not enrolled full time in private or public school, rather they are using funds on a suite of new educational products and services all available on an education marketplace of providers and innovators. Step Up For Students now has more than 160 product vendors on its MyScholarShop online platform, with more than 80,000 individual educational products, some 7,500 non-private school businesses, and about 19,000 service providers.
“We are thrilled to have set the national standard in offering families the diverse learning options they deserve,” Step Up For Students CEO Gretchen Schoenhaar said. “We continue to innovate in technology and refine our processes that define the customer experience, encourage more providers to enter the marketplace and transform education.”
Combined with other innovative education options outside the FTC scholarship program, such as magnet and charter schools and career academies, more than half of the state’s K-12 students use an education option that is not their assigned public school. That’s nearly 1.9 million students.
Meanwhile, 52 of Florida’s 67 School Districts have now partnered with Step Up For Students to offer fee-based classes and services to students using FTC scholarships. Florida is the only state in the nation to offer such a program.
Starting next year, the Step Up Step Further Scholarship Fund plans to administer the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit Program. Individual taxpayers will receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 when they donate to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) of their choice. The scholarships will provide eligible K-12 families in both public and private schools with additional resources for tuition, tutoring, technology, and educational resources.
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